The Summer Prince Read Online Free PDF Page A

is a body tree, all done in colored skin lights. When I’m done, the branches and leaves should travel all the way down my torso and up my neck. The tips of the branches will brush against my unadorned cheeks. It should be very dramatic, but at the moment, I look a little strange.
    On the left-hand holo, they’re showing a recap of the final competition. Octavio’s poem is first, and if he spoke it to me just then, I might be tempted to forget even Enki. The poem speaks of longing and love — and I have to wonder if the one he loves is dead, because how else could they resist him? And how else could he leave them?
    Pasqual is next, and the plaintive string section playing the melody of “Manhã de Carnaval” gives me shivers. He plays the guitar from the front of the stage.
    “I’d forgotten how pretty that song can be,” Gil says a little wistfully, into the silence that follows his last note.
    “Traitor,” I say again, without much conviction.
    And then it’s Enki’s turn. We’ve already seen this once, but Gil and I reach for each other at the exact same moment. His pulse thrums beneath my fingertips and my own lights flash like falling stars. The wakas in the audience stop their screaming. They’re like us: breathless and silent, waiting for their beautiful boy.

    Here’s how Enki becomes the summer king:
    He walks into the spotlight dressed like a slave in old-Brazil: off-white burlap sackcloth trousers, ragged at the hem, short-sleeved shirt with a jagged gash of a collar. His ear-length dreadlocks are loose andlighter colored than I’ve seen them. Later, we will learn that he has snuck out of the city to literally rub road dust into his hair.
    His feet are bare, like the poorest refugee from the flat cities. Like someone unaware of even the most basic courtesy due the Queen of the most powerful city in South America.
    There’s a gasp when he first lifts his right leg. The skin on the soles of his feet is even lighter than mine, and I’m as light-skinned as anyone is allowed to be in Palmares Três.
    He puts his foot down. Pauses. Lifts up the other.
    Still balanced on one leg, he spins. We’re so tense, so worried and exhilarated, that laughter pops like a bubble. It’s gentle, barely there, but Enki smiles. He puts his foot down and now, again, he’s barefoot on the stage.
    His rudeness of going barefoot would be bad enough in the presence of the Aunties.
    But he’s facing Queen Oreste.
    We wonder what will happen. Our worries change from Maybe he won’t win to Maybe the Queen will turn him out of the city.
    “My Queen,” says Enki. His voice isn’t very low, but it’s smooth as a guitar.
    He doesn’t bow, though he’s a boy, because only the summer king doesn’t bow to the Queen.
    For a very long time, she is still. She doesn’t seem to breathe, and neither do we. Her eyebrows are drawn together — her only sign of emotion.
    “What is this, Enki?” says the Queen. “Do you not honor me?”
    Enki’s smile is wide and bright. “I give you the greatest honor,” he says.
    “You are dressed in the manner of a slave,” says she, “in a city where there are none.”
    “There aren’t,” he agrees, though now his smile seems too sharp for his words. “But there is the verde.”
    “And what of it?”
    “I am dressed in the manner of my people.”
    “Are we not your people?” And we see that the Queen is torn between amusement and anger. Enki is leading her in a dance, but has not tapped out its rhythm.
    “You are everything to me.”
    “And yet you come before us hardly as a king.”
    “I come before you,” says Enki, “as a simple verde boy.”
    He takes a quick step back, almost skipping, and his dust-lightened hair bobs around his ears.
    “I will leave you as a king.”
    And when the drums start, that’s how he dances: as a king.

    Gil’s mother is a tailor, so she always has piles of cloth she doesn’t know what to do with. Gil says he’s sick of clothes, he